Page:The Portrait of a Lady (1882).djvu/103

THE PORTRAIT OF A LADY. 95 disturbed her, in the sense that it struck her with wonderment, was this very fact that it cost her so little to refuse a great opportunity. With whatever qualifications one would, Lord Warburton had offered her a great opportunity ; the situation might have discomforts, might contain elements that would displease her, but she did her sex no injustice in believing that nineteen women out of twenty would accommodate themselves to it with extreme zeal. Why then upon her also should it not impose itself 1 Who was she, what was she, that she should hold herself superior? What view of life, what design upon fate, what conception of happiness, had she that pretended to be larger than this large occasion 1 If she would not do this, then she must do great things, she must do something greater. Poor Isabel found occasion to remind herself from time to time that she must not be too proud, and nothing could be more sincere than her prayer to be delivered from such a danger; for the isolation and loneliness of pricfe had for her mind the horror of a desert place. If it were pride that interfered with her accepting Lord Warburton, it was singularly misplaced ; and she was so conscious of liking him that she ventured to assure herself it was not. She liked him too much to marry him, that was the point ; something told her that she should not be satisfied, and to inflict upon a man who offered so much a wife with a tendency to criticise would be a peculiarly discredit- able act. She had promised him that she would consider his proposal, and when, after he had left her, she wandered back to the bench where he had found her, and lost herself in meditation, it might have seemed that she was keeping her word. But this was not the case ; she was wondering whether she were not a cold, hard girl; and when at last she got up and rather quickly went back to the house, it was because, as she had said to Lord Warburton, she was really frightened at herself. XIII. IT was this feeling, and not the wish to ask advice she had no desire whatever for that that led her to speak to her uncle of what Lord Warburton had said to her. She wished to speak to some one ; she should feel more natural, more human, and her uncle, for this purpose, presented himself in a more attractive light than either her aunt or her friend Henrietta. Her cousin,